“You’re protective of me. I get it,” I told him softly, surprised by his cursing. “You don’t need to beat yourself up over this, Ethan. We don’t know the ins and outs. Maybe it was self-defense. You don’t know. Unless you look.”

“I don’t want to,” he confessed.

“Then don’t.”

“It’s not as easy as that.”

“No, it isn’t,” I confirmed, “but the truth is, you have a long life ahead of you. A lot of time to figure out your roots. Just covering them up won’t help you, love. Just burying your head in the sand when you need answers will get you nowhere.”

“True.” He grunted. “Maybe in time.”

“Yeah. In time.”

He cleared his throat after a while of us just sitting together, restful despite the conversation at hand. “Sabina?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

I tensed at his somber tone. “When?”

“With Kian and Joshua?”

I swallowed. “I told you some of it.”

“Not all of it.”

“No.” I bit my lip as I thought about how to answer. The past and the present no longer blurred, but with Joshua? He was a blank space in my future that I could never erase. “Kian and I loved each other. It was crazy to bring a baby into the mix, but we were stupid and young. We thought that was the only way my father would let us be together—”

“He couldn’t have stopped you.”

A bark of laughter escaped me. “Oh, but he could. He’d planned a marriage between me and a boy from another family, don’t forget. The night I told him I was pregnant was the night he told me about the marriage.”

Ethan sucked in a breath. “Jesus.”

“Yeah. I was lucky I was pregnant, because I know things would have happened fast after that.

“He locked me in my room, but my sister, Lara, helped me get out. She’d called Kian, and he was there, waiting for me a few streets away. I never went home again.”

Maybe he heard the sadness in my voice, a sadness he might not be able to understand because he was disconnected from his family in a way I wasn’t, but while the men in my line had been bastards, my sisters weren’t. My mother wasn’t. Weak, yes, but horrible? No.

He ran a hand over my arm, soothing me with his touch. “Austin mentioned you had sisters. Do you think they’re like you?”

“Cyrilo was special, wasn’t he? I don’t see why they wouldn’t be too.”

He hummed at that, then his voice deepened, changed, and I knew what he was going to ask before he even finished the question. “You carried to term, didn’t you?”

“I did.” Sadness filled me, as did the horror of having Joshua and losing him to a family grudge. My lungs felt like Ariel’s—compressed, tight and taut, unable to let me breathe. But then I registered where I was and with whom. I was also older and wiser.

I swallowed, but it was thick and hard to do so. “I thought when we moved away, we were safe. Then, the day after I got out of the hospital, we were driving down this road. It was bright, the sun was so fierce it hurt my eyes, even though it was winter. There was snow on all sides, and the plows had just been out, and we were so fucking happy. We’re from the South, we’d never seen snow before. It was like a gift.

“And Joshua? He was beautiful. So beautiful, Ethan. He was perfect.”

I peered up at him through tear-drenched lashes and saw his sorrow for me. When he pressed his lips to my temple, I sighed. I wasn’t soothed, but it was better than the gnawing emptiness that I’d always had as cold comfort before.

“He was tucked into the car seat. He should have been safe. We all should have been. But as we rounded this curve, suddenly, there was a big truck there.” I gulped. “It came straight for us, moving onto our side of the road. We collided because every time Kian tried to maneuver out the way, Cyrilo wended into our path.

“Even though I knew Kian was doing his best, it wasn’t enough. It would never be because Cyrilo was there with his orders. I knew we were dead.”

“But you survived,” he whispered softly.

“Yeah. Only just.” My mouth trembled. “It was luck, if you’d believe it. Where he pushed us off the road, it landed us into the next county. It muddled things in the news. So when I went into the hospital, he checked the wrong one. He never was that smart though. He should have checked both.

“Dad put too much faith in him because he had a penis. But his stupidity was my saving grace. Even if, for most of my recovery, I wanted to die.”

He squeezed me. “Thank you for living.”

My lips curved into a sad smile, and I reached up, ran my fingers through his hair, and whispered, “You’re welcome. But I know now why I survived.” I shrugged. “To be here, with you.” I kissed his lips. “Most of my family sucks. There’s no way to argue that. But yours? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s cool. And maybe they’re horrible. Don’t discount things just because it’s your knee-jerk reaction, hmm?”

With that said, my story imparted and never to be shared again because I couldn’t keep looking back to the past, I turned my face into his collar and let myself weep.

For Joshua.

For Kian.

Because they had no happy ending, and my love for them was as pure now as it had been back then.

Love didn’t die.

It changed.

Morphed with the years.

But it stuck fast.

Even while my heart beat solely for Eli, Ethan, and Austin, the memory of what I felt for Kian and Joshua was capable of taking my breath away.

So I sobbed in my mate’s arms and let him hold me as I absorbed the grief that would always linger, knowing that I was safe and out of harm’s way and in the arms of men who’d die to protect me.

More importantly, who I’d kill to defend.

Seventeen

Eli

With her hand in mine, we walked into the diner.

Austin and Ethan flanked me with Daniel hovering just ahead, moving with a dance to his step that made me smile, because it told me that in a few short weeks, we’d managed to improve his life. As we passed through the doors, the entire place came to a standstill.

Highbanks wasn’t the biggest town, but we were densely populated and most of that population were members of my pack.

The few humans here tended to be on the outskirts of the town, and I was more than okay with that, since the cross section of our town, the Rainford area, and then Drake’s Point, one of the biggest cities and for which the county was named, was where the humans tended to congregate.

So when I walked in, quickly scanned the diner, and saw no humans, I knew I could relax some and that my reason for being here didn’t need to be put off until some trucker had finished his apple pie.

The diner was an unofficial meeting ground for the pack. My father had been too up his own ass to even consider that the pack might gather every Wednesday night at six PM to talk about shit they knew the council didn’t give a fuck about, but I wasn’t like him.

I’d known for a while how it rolled, mostly because Austin and Ethan had warned me back when we were younger, and also because I knew the pack had to have a voice.